Managing ticket tags

Tags are words, or combinations of words, you can use to add more context to tickets (see About tags). This article describes how you can manage ticket tags for your Zendesk account. You must be an administrator to do the tag management tasks described in this article.

Analyzing ticket tag activity

Zendesk Support provides you with a view into the tags that have been applied to your tickets. Admins can view the 100 most-active tags for the last two months. This list is updated daily.

To view popular tags

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tags.

You can click a tag in the cloud to display the list of tickets that include the tag. You can also view all the forum topics that include the tag.

Viewing all tickets where a tag is applied

To help you manage tags, it can be useful to see where the tag is applied.

To see where tags are applied

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tags.

A list of the most popular tags (the top 100) appears. The tag name includes the number of times the tag has been applied. For example, sales_lead (326).

Click a tag.

A list of tickets that include the tag appears. To open a ticket, select it from the list.

Admin > Tags displays the top 100 most-used tags for the past two months. If the tag you're looking for isn't on the list, you can search for tickets by tag. You can also create a view to see all tickets based on a specific tag.

Deleting a tag and removing it from all non-closed tickets

You can edit each ticket manually delete tags. To remove tags that have been applied to many tickets, you can do this in a batch operation. You cannot delete tags from closed tickets.

Deleted tags may still appear in the tag cloud until the closed tickets that contain the tag are retired out of the list. Also, deleting tags does not remove references to them in automations, macros, and triggers.

To delete a tag from all open tickets

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tags.

Click the tag that you want to delete.

At the bottom of the tag activity detail screen, click Remove tag [tag name] from all topics and open tickets.

Click OK to confirm that you want to proceed.

Admin > Tags displays the top 100 most-used tags for the past two months. To delete a tag that isn't on the list, you can search for tickets by tag and delete them manually from the tickets and topics that you have access to.

Using ticket tags in macros, triggers, and automations

Adding tags to your tickets gives you even more flexibility to track, manage, and interact with your tickets. They can be used to attach additional data to your tickets, which you can then use in your automations, macros, and triggers. You can use business rules to add, remove, or set tags. If you select the set tags action, the current tags will be replaced with the tags you enter.

As an example, let's look at how a tag can be used in a trigger. If you use email subdomains, you may have set up a subdomain to track the tickets that are generated through responses to your newsletter. You can set up a trigger to check for the origin of the ticket using the Ticket received at condition, as shown here:

You can then add an action that adds a tag to the ticket, as shown here:

You can then use this tag to create a view that shows you all the tickets that have been created from newsletter responses. You can also use the tag as a condition or an action in some other automation, macro, or trigger. For example you might want to exclude this tag for some reason when you're defining the selection of tickets you want to be acted on by a trigger, as shown here:

Drop-down custom fields also create ticket tags and they can also be used in automations, macros, and triggers as well.

If I want a print out of all ticket tags by usage and I follow that guide, I get to a point where I'm selecting Ticket Tag Is, and then I'm limited to 200.

We have 1804 ticket tags. I'm obviously not going to create a custom metric for 1804 tags.

What I'd really like (and I know you dont do this) is just to be able to report on macro usage without having to rely on tags, and I'd like to get a report/count of ALL of my tags. I realise this will be a very large report.

Appreciate the clarification and totally understand where you're coming from. I do wish there was an easier way to report on macro usage other than the option I provided previously. The only alternative I can think of is to navigate to the Macro page under Admin>Manage and sort by usage (last 30 days). Screenshot for you below:

The downside to this is that you can only get usage as far as 30 days ago so you'd most likely need to track this monthly.

As for reporting on tags, if you're looking under the How tab and select Ticket Tags you should see an All option at the bottom of the Details column. I've provide another screenshot for you:

Hi! Is there a way to report on Tag usage for the last 7 days - we're wanting to pull the data for all the tags used and the amount of times each tag was used for specifically one week at a time. Thanks for any input!

You should be able to report on this using Insights. Since these tags are being applied to the tickets you could use the Ticket Tag attribute under the How tab and # Tickets under the What tab. You may also find this article helpful when setting up your report: Reporting on macros using tags in Insights

Is there a best practices for setting up tags? We are about to go live and wondering the best way to report questions that come in. From a reporting perspective, I'm not excited that agents can come up with a wide variety of tags that could be covering the same topic. It's best to have fewer tags to better concentrate the topics that come in.

On the other hand, is there a way to create it so that we create the tags or options agents can pick from? In this way we could standardize the categories. The down side is that it does lead to greater maintenance by the admins. We are using Enterprise.

Hi Joe, I'm sure you'll get a wide variety of answers based on different implementations. Speaking from my experience, I've found that asking the agents to *not* add their own tags and just relying on tags that naturally progress in triggers, macros, drop-down fields and the like.... This is how we get the best info.

First, human nature is to try one set of tags and forget. Second, you could have different agents using different tags for the same thing...

With that in mind, adding tags to those macros, triggers and using drop-down options in custom fields like Ticket Category really helps a lot and gives you rich insights (and troubleshooting) for later.

I guess I'm assuming your agents will be manually adding tags so forgive me if I misinterpreted.